The Popular Party in the Cabildo supports the initiative of the Santa Cruz City Hall to extend tram line 4 to the neighborhood of Acorán in the capital’s municipality. The people’s counselor Manuel Fernandez will defend this Friday a motion in the insular plenary to study the feasibility of taking the light rail beyond anaza as proposed by the Mobility area chaired by Enrique Arriaga (citizens). This would mean, according to his calculations, reaching the 30,000 beneficiaries, about 4,000 more than the figure initially forecast, since it also includes the nearby coastal towns of El Rosario within the area of direct influence. Lope Afonso, candidate for the presidency of the Cabildo, appreciates that “mobility projects in Tenerife They have to be planned from the perspective that we form a dynamic society, with the aim, furthermore, of applying definitive solutions to the problem of traffic collapse and not patches that in a few years will become a new problem”.
The proposal that Fernández will defend involves the extension of this line to the Acorán neighborhood, as requested by the Santa Cruz City Council itself, “giving coverage to this entire area of the capital, but also to the residents of the coast of the municipality of El Rosario, particularly those in the Costanera neighborhood and other nearby areas such as Radazul and Tabaiba so that the tram would cover almost 30,000 people and not the 25,000 calculated if it ended up in Añaza. get the consensus of the rest of the political groups to approve your motion. Afonso argues that the data made public by the INE (National Statistics Institute) indicate that “Tenerife has established itself, over the last few years, as the most populated island in the archipelago, and leads the demographic growth in Canary Islands”. “On our Island alone, 50% of the population growth of the entire archipelago accumulates, and this increase in inhabitants brings with it some consequences, such as the need for displacement, which we must treat with perspective and planning, so that all the infrastructures that are promote that attend to the social reality and the mobility needs of all citizens”, emphasizes Lope Afonso.
The project
In this sense, the current government of the Tenerife Cabildo recently announced that during this year the project for a new line of the Tenerife tram system will be drawn up, line 4, which would start from the Nuestra Señora de Candelaria University Hospital to the Añaza neighborhood, passing by those of Las Moraditas de Taco, San Matías (La Laguna), El Draguillo and Saint Mary of the Sea. Six kilometers of track, with seven new stops, which would pass through the municipalities of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and La Laguna to serve some 25,000 residents of one of the most inhabited areas of the metropolitan area, and with an estimated demand of more than one million of passengers per year.
The popular ones estimate that the line would cover 30,000 residents
Manuel Fernández is critical of the insular government when affirming that “From the Popular Party we have demanded an agreed roadmap in everything that has to do with the large mobility infrastructures of the Island, such as trains or the tram, with the aim of adequately planning the development of the guided system in Tenerife”. However, he understands that “the insular government has broken that consensus with the presentation of a project for which it has not counted on opposition groups, and not even with the Santa Cruz City Council, the municipality on which most of the of the layout of line 422. On this aspect, Manuel Fernández insists: “There has not been a consensus on the decision to promote this line and not others that were also planned”. Among them, he mentions the expansion of line 1 to the Los Rodeos airport, line 2 to the La Gallega neighborhood, the new line 3 that would cross the center of Santa Cruz to the end of Avenida de Anaga, or the project of Train Trainwhich would run through the South of the Island from San Isidro to Costa Adeje.
In this context, The Popular Party claims the need to plan from “the agreement of all” the mobility policies of the Island in order that “they are not subject to political fluctuations, but to the real mobility needs of the population”. Both Lope Afonso and Manuel Fernández agree that “the proposal that we are going to defend in the Cabildo this Friday is a historic neighborhood claim from the residents of the area, for which we hope to obtain the support of all the parties represented.”
Santa Cruz demanded last December from the Cabildo that Line 4 of the tramway reach Acorán. The capital’s City Council celebrated that the Island Corporation promoted this new route in the Southwest of the municipality, although without sharing that the last stop is that of Añaza. Mayor, Jose Manuel BermudezHe recalled that at the last meeting the Cabildo “saw viable” the proposed appointment. “The project must include support measures for the affected sectors, such as the taxi” Bermúdez valued. The mayor of El Rosario, Escolástico Gil, was much more skeptical regarding the possible benefit for his neighbors given how far Acorán is from the neighborhoods on the Rosario coast except for Costanera, although everything will depend on the exact location of the stop yet to be defined. It should be remembered that the residents of Costanera already opposed the passage of the southern train due to the noise and the possible environmental impact in the area.
